There was something a bit unearthly in the ambiance of Beechwood, something poetic, which made it unlike other houses of the kind I'd seen in America, and this strangeness made me think sometimes of a kind of Hudson River Last Year at Marienbad." An influence on the film was Buñvel's Exterminating Angel, with it's trapped party guests gradually reverting to barbarity. "My accidental discovery of Beechwood," he writes, "led me to the making of Savages, though at the time - November, 1970 - I couldn't have described what sort of film I wanted to shoot in it. But by the time Ivory happened onto it, the elder Vanderlip had died, his children had married and moved away, and only a grandson and great grandson still lived, or camped, there. Called Beechwood, it belonged to the Vanderlip family, Midwesterners who derived their wealth from railroads and flourished in the earlier part of the century. In an article in the Autumn 1971 issue of the British film journal Sight and Sound, Ivory relates that he came across a Colonial Revival mansion in Scarborough, forty minutes north of New York City, that had intrigued him. The genesis of the company's next feature film, Savages, goes back to 1970. Extravagantly romantic fantasies are the stuff of this popular art form, of which Helen is clearly "queen." More About Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls Stepping neatly around the puritanic codes governing Indian films that forbid direct sexual contact (even kissing), the musicals project sexuality fervently through innuendo - in teasing situations and the sensuality of Helen's dancing. Indian musical films that provided the background of Bombay Talkie now come to life before the bemused viewer.
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In part the movie is a montage of scenes from her pictures and of the opening sequence in Bombay Talkie in which Helen dances with Shashi Kapoor on the keys of a giant red typewriter.
The subject of the film, which cost a modest $17,000 to make, is the most popular dancer in Bombay musical films - so much so that since 1957 she had appeared in five hundred of them. It was directed and narrated by him, but the scenario was devised by Ivory. The idea for the documentary came from Anthony Korner, an associate of Merchant Ivory's in the period, and now the publisher of Art Forum.
Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls, a 30-minute documentary film that looks at an aspect of Indian culture from a rather whimsical angle, has always been a popular Merchant Ivory film.
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